Nic Pizzolatto

“At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.”

“I left the University of Chicago's creative writing program for a tenure-track job at DePauw University in Indiana, then left DePauw in 2010 for Los Angeles.”

“In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them.”

“For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.”

“I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.”

“There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.”

“Nothing in the television show 'True Detective' was plagiarized.”

“You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don't know what they're talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty.”

“Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life.”

“I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.”

“I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all.”

“You just do the best you can, and when you're able to connect with people, and when you do, it's just incredibly gratifying.”

“I don't think you can create effectively toward expectation. I'm not in the service business.”

“It's better to not have a reputation than a bad one.”

“'True Detective' is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That's what we shoot for.”

“In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of 'True Detective' that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.”

“Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.”

“The work is where I tend to feel pressure - not so much in the reaction to it.”

“Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.”

“If you are a certain kind of hands-on learner and have been in a writers room and know how scripts get made, and you know what pre-production is, then mostly it's making sure the actors get what they need, and you are providing creative oversight while allowing room for everyone else to own the material, too.”